Revision as of 14:50, 14 June 2013

Eclipse is an open source community project, which aims to provide a universal development platform. The Eclipse project is most widely known for its cross-platform integrated development environment (IDE). The Arch Linux packages (and this guide) relate specifically to the IDE.

The Eclipse IDE is largely written in Java but can be used to develop applications in a number of languages, including Java, C/C++, PHP, Perl and Python. The IDE can also provide subversion support and task management.

Add the default update site

Make sure that you first add the default update site for your installed version of Eclipse so that plugin dependencies can automatically be installed. The most current version of Eclipse is Juno and the default update site for Juno is: http://download.eclipse.org/releases/juno. Go to Help > Install new Software > Add, fill the name to easily identify the update site later - for instance, Juno Software Repository - and fill the location with the url.

Eclipse Marketplace

To use the Eclipse Marketplace, first you need to install it (hey, that fells familiar. I wonder why?). Go to Help > Install new software > switch to the default update site > General Purpose Tools > Marketplace Client. Restart Eclipse and it will be available in Help > Eclipse Marketplace.

Plugin manager

Use Eclipse's plugin manager to download and install plugins from their original repositories: in this case you have to find the needed repository in the plugin's website, then go to Help > Install New Software..., enter the repository in the Work with field, select the plugin to install from the list below and follow the instructions.

Note:

If you install plugins with Eclipse's plugin manager, you are advised to launch Eclipse as root: this way the plugins will be installed in /usr/share/eclipse/plugins/; if you installed them as normal user, they would be stored in a version-dependent folder inside ~/.eclipse/, and, after upgrading Eclipse, they wouldn't be recognized any longer.

Do not use Eclipse as root for your everyday work.

Updates via plugin manager

Run Eclipse and select Help > Check for Updates. If you have installed them as root as advised in the section above, you have to run Eclipse as root.

For plugins to be updated, you should check to have their update repositories enabled in Window > Preferences > Install/Update > Available Software Sites: you can find each plugin's repository(es) on the respective project website. To add, edit, remove... repositories just use the buttons on the right of the Available Software Sites panel. For Eclipse 4.2 (Juno), check you have enabled this repository:

To receive update notifications, go to Window > Preferences > Install/Update > Automatic Updates. If you want to receive notifications for plugins installed as root, you should run Eclipse as root, go to Window > Preferences > Install/Update > Available Software Sites, select the repositories related to the installed plugins and Export them, then run Eclipse as normal user and Import them in the same panel.

Offline version

If you have no internet connection on your development machine or do not want to constantly consume bandwidth for the documentation, you can store the documentation locally, by installing the openjdk7-src package. Eclipse should find the javadocs automatically.

Now everything should just work fine and tooltips should display correctly. To prevent overwriting this configuration on update, append /usr/share/eclipse/eclipse.ini to the NoUpgrade line in /etc/pacman.conf as follows: